Arguing against the validity of reason - D'Souza - Kant

[saden1]

Kant's critique is not criticism (unlike D'Souza) but critical analyses of reason. Kant is not attacking pure reason except to show its limitations. Above all else he hopes to show its possibility and to exult it above impure knowledge which comes to us through distorted sensory channel. Thus pure reason is to mean knowledge that does not come to us through our senses but is independent of all sense experience. Knowledge belonging to us by inherent nature and structure of the mind.

This explains his take quite well:

In the Critique Kant thus rejects the insight into an intelligible world that he defended in the Inaugural Dissertation, and he now claims that rejecting knowledge about things in themselves is necessary for reconciling science with traditional morality and religion. This is because he claims that belief in God, freedom, and immortality have a strictly moral basis, and yet adopting these beliefs on moral grounds would be unjustified if we could know that they were false. “Thus,” Kant says, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Bxxx). Restricting knowledge to appearances and relegating God and the soul to an unknowable realm of things in themselves guarantees that it is impossible to disprove claims about God and the freedom or immortality of the soul, which moral arguments may therefore justify us in believing. Moreover, the determinism of modern science no longer threatens the freedom required by traditional morality, because science and therefore determinism apply only to appearances, and there is room for freedom in the realm of things in themselves, where the self or soul is located. We cannot know (theoretically) that we are free, because we cannot know anything about things in themselves. But there are especially strong moral grounds for the belief in human freedom, which acts as “the keystone” supporting other morally grounded beliefs (5:3–4). In this way, Kant replaces transcendent metaphysics with a new practical science that he calls the metaphysics of morals. It thus turns out that two kinds of metaphysics are possible: the metaphysics of experience (or nature) and the metaphysics of morals, both of which depend on Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy.

BTW, don't try to read Critique of Pure Reason by Kant himself...that's shit damn near impossible to read.